Damage Control

Voters need to believe that John Kerry can put the country back on track.

During the loneliest days of his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination, last December, when he was trailing Al Sharpton in some polls and reporters covering the race were placing bets that he’d drop out before the first voters were heard from in the Iowa caucuses, Senator John Kerry came to New York to address the Council on Foreign Relations. It was hard, then, to find anyone outside his immediate family who would speak with unaverted eyes of the likelihood of a Kerry comeback. Even among the Democrats in his audience, which was packed with soberly tailored politicians, diplomats, military officers, and captains of finance, industry, philanthropy, and think tanks, there was a sense of near-certitude—for some delightful, for others grim—that Howard Dean was unstoppable. As a governor, Dean had been spared having to take sides when the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to invade Iraq was passed in both houses of Congress, in October of 2002, and he’d made himself a scourge to his rivals in the primary race who voted for it. He called them “Bush Lite.” Kerry’s deeply recessed eyes, small as an elephant’s, appeared more than usually narrowed in those days, and his smile, too, had tightened into the sort of skeptical wince that a cartoon dad displays to signal his endurance of adolescent noise. But he didn’t waste a word on Dean when he addressed the council.

Kerry had stayed up late for several nights, crafting his speech, and it was as succinct and cogent a summation of his case against the President as he has offered to date. “Simply put,” Kerry declared, “the Bush Administration has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in modern history”:

In the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks, the world rallied to the common cause of fighting terrorism. But President Bush has squandered that historic moment. . . . He rushed into battle—and he went almost alone. . . . I believed a year ago and I believe now that we had to hold Saddam Hussein accountable and that we needed to lead in that effort. But this Administration did it in the worst possible way: without the United Nations, without our allies, without a plan to win the peace. So we are left asking: How is it possible to liberate a country, depose a ruthless dictator who at least in the past had weapons of mass destruction, and convert a preordained success into a diplomatic fiasco? How is it possible to do what the Bush Administration has done in Iraq: win a great military victory yet make America weaker?

Kerry called on the Administration to “swallow its pride” and do what it should have done in the first place: bring in the U.N. and the “international community” to help America succeed instead of inviting failure alone.

Kerry’s position has not changed, and, seven months later, his critique of Bush is shared by a growing majority of voters. But passionate antipathy to Bush has not translated into a corresponding enthusiasm for Kerry. Even after his astonishing sweep of the primaries, and the widely celebrated selection of John Edwards as his running mate, Kerry perplexes much of the electorate. Although he has led Bush in the polls during the runup to the Democratic Convention, many voters still complain that they do not know what he stands for. Kerry can be frustratingly vague and inarticulate, but then Presidential challengers—who have no power to take action—have always thought it wise not to box themselves into specific foreign-policy commitments. In a race that is sure to be uncommonly harsh and uncommonly dirty, Kerry has sought to limit his size as a target. His ever-sharpening attacks on an ever more vulnerable President aside, he avoids taking firm positions on the immediate tactical questions of Iraq policy (whether the U.S. should send more troops, how to deal with the insurgents, how much de-Baathification is too little or too much), preferring to talk about strategy in broad terms that create the maximum contrast between his position and that of the President. Indeed, when it comes to Iraq, Kerry has been largely content so far to allow the Presidential race to play out as a one-man scramble, Bush vs. Bush.

Throughout the spring and early summer—with exposés of Bush’s rush to war stacking the best-seller lists, while the September 11th commission hearings filled television screens, alongside reports of rampant insurrection in Iraq and the irreparable disgrace of Americans torturing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison—Kerry seemed to be measuring out his comments on the war with deliberate reserve. “A few months ago,” Richard Holbrooke said to me, “I couldn’t go down the street in New York or Washington without people stopping me and asking, ‘Why isn’t he speaking out more clearly on Iraq?’ ” But Holbrooke, who is considered a leading contender for the post of Secretary of State in a Kerry Administration, thought that Kerry had just the right strategy. “We are in the throes of the greatest crisis since Vietnam and maybe even worse. Kerry has to allow events to unfold. But he should not be expected to lay out a plan significantly more detailed than he has, because it’s not necessary at this point. Everyone knows he would do it differently.” Sandy Berger, who was Bill Clinton’s national-security adviser and who is now advising Kerry, agreed, and he went further. “There are no silver bullets on Iraq,” he said. “So if people are waiting for John Kerry to say, ‘The answer is Rosebud,’ there is no Rosebud.”

Americans are unaccustomed to questions of foreign policy, grand strategy, and war figuring decisively in a Presidential contest. In the nearly thirty years since our evacuation from Vietnam, such matters have been the province of specialists, addressed on the campaign trail with a minimum of partisan passion, either in broad abstractions (Reagan’s “evil empire,” Bush’s “new world order,” Clinton’s “assertive multilateralism”) or technocratically (arms control, U.N. resolutions, weapons systems, trade agreements). The shock of the September 11th attacks in 2001 forced these issues to the center of public consciousness and, simultaneously, muted political debate as the leaders of both parties allowed the President and his most favored ministers—Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft—an extraordinarily free hand to promulgate and implement his war policy abroad and at home. It took Dean’s brief and sensational antiwar candidacy to bring this go-along-and-get-along period to an end. Since then, the unravelling of Bush’s case for attacking Saddam Hussein, and his retreat from his original ambitions for postwar Iraq, have left him increasingly on the defensive.

Subtract Iraq from the equation, and this would be a completely different election. Had Bush prosecuted the war differently—with the degree of international backing that Kerry advocated—or focussed his warrior energies after September 11th on making a success of rebuilding Afghanistan and pursuing Al Qaeda, who would now hold it against him? Ten years ago, Henry Kissinger identified “two contradictory attitudes toward foreign policy” in American history: “The first is that America serves its values best by perfecting democracy at home, thereby acting as a beacon for the rest of mankind; the second, that America’s values impose on it an obligation to crusade for them around the world.” Adherents of the America-as-beacon school were disposed toward isolationism, while those who subscribed to the notion of America as crusader were compelled to commit America abroad. When Bush ran for President, four years ago, he was an old-school beacon man, hostile to “nation building” and the overextension of American forces. After September 11th, he came out as a crusader, with an absolutist twist—a unilateralism so uncompromising that, as Kerry put it to me, “we’re the ones isolated.”

Despite the bloody and embittering disarray of Iraqi life after more than a year under the American dispensation, Bush describes the Iraq adventure as a great success for the cause of freedom—exactly as he said it would be before the war. The main change in attitude lies in the grammatical perspective, a shift in tense from future perfect to present continuous. If anything, Bush’s insistence on the righteousness of his script has intensified. He jokes about never reading newspapers, lets it be known that he communicates with the Almighty, and dismisses his critics as pessimists. He told the nation that if he had made any mistakes he was unaware of them, and he said, “I fully understand the consequences of what we’re doing. We’re changing the world.”

Last month on c-span, Kerry responded, “If you haven’t made mistakes, you’re not a living human.” By way of an example, he pointed to his own Senate vote, in October of 2002, for the Iraq war resolution. His mistake, he said, was “to trust what the President said” at the time. But Kerry didn’t repudiate his vote; he never has, even when the temptation was enormous. On the day after his appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, last December, he spent the better part of two hours at the Upper West Side apartment of the comedian and Democratic activist Al Franken, trying to justify the vote to a couple of dozen pundits and reporters. It was a parochial gathering, all male, overwhelmingly Jewish, and, with the exception of a few professional agnostics, openly identified as liberal or, at least, unhappy with Bush. A friendly crowd, you would think, but Kerry tied himself in knots, rehashing all the what-ifs that he’d struggled with following Bush’s challenge to the U.N., a day after the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks: Join us in enforcing the many long-standing Security Council resolutions against Iraq, or we’ll do it our way without you. No politician at the time doubted Saddam’s mendacity, or questioned the existence of his arsenal of illegal weapons of mass destruction, and Bush promised that he would make war only as a last resort, and only with the fullest possible international support. It was obvious to Kerry that a President should have the authority to back up diplomacy with force, and he had announced before casting his vote that he was voting not for war but to prevent it. The attitude at Franken’s place was: Yes, sure, but how could you? Kerry said again that he’d been misled, and, when that still wasn’t good enough for some, he shouldered a measure of blame. “I believed,” he said, and he repeated the phrase several times: “I believed.”

On the campaign trail, Kerry’s oratorical style often brings to mind a man hailing a ship—one hand clutching a mike in front of his Adam’s apple, the other hand pistoning from shoulder to waist like an oil-field pump jack, his voice hammering along to the same relentless rhythm, a seesaw booming. At his declamatory worst, Kerry can turn good, sound thought and cogent argument into a swamp of sound that inclines the listener to tune out, much like the mwah-mwah-mwah of adults in “Peanuts” cartoons. But at the end of April, in Fulton, Missouri, he spoke about Iraq in the gym of Westminster College—a forum made famous by Winston Churchill, who first used the term “iron curtain” there, in a speech that is remembered as an opening salvo of the Cold War—and, reading from a teleprompter with both hands clutching the lectern, Kerry shed the grandiosity and sounded more the way he does in serious one-on-one conversation, firm and direct, comfortably in command. The shift in Kerry’s tone reflected his purpose, which was to speak, for once, not as a candidate must to score points and win votes but as a President should, and he spelled out the obligations of that purpose step by step as he went along: to name the “hard truths,” then to describe “what is possible,” and, finally, to explain, “Here is how we must proceed.”

Kerry owed his presence in Fulton to Dick Cheney, who had spoken at the hallowed gym a few days earlier and had spent so much of his time there Kerry-bashing that the school president—a retired brigadier general—had invited the Democrat to speak for himself. Cheney’s negative example required Kerry to demonstrate statesmanship by offering an alternative, corrective agenda. “This may be our last chance to get this right,” Kerry said, and, as always, that meant “We have to truly internationalize both politically and militarily: we cannot depend on a U.S.-only presence.”

The mission he had in mind was elaborate: involving the U.N. and nato and an international high commissioner in a dizzying hatchwork of overlapping and shared authority. It was as lavish an expression of multilateralism as the Bush mission is stark in its unilateralism. But, while there were too many notes in the composition of Kerry’s dream coalition, it struck the signature chord of his campaign’s foreign policy unmistakably: that “America is safer and stronger when it is respected around the world, not feared,” and that such respect must come from strong alliances, forged by the hard work of diplomatic persuasion under committed Presidential leadership. “Now the question,” Kerry announced. “Why would others join a cause that they did not support in the first place? For one simple reason: it’s in their profound self-interest. And the President needs to put that self-interest on the table and before the world.”

Kerry can’t be specific about what he would do in Iraq if he is sworn in next January 20th, because nobody knows what will be happening there then. He said that “America must lead in new ways” to meet “new threats,” “new enemies,” and “new opportunities” with “new approaches” and “new strategies,” to forge “a new era of alliances” and “a new direction in Iraq,” but there was nothing novel in the foreign policy he described. What he was calling for was a renewal of the approach to world order that Churchill envisioned in 1946—the preservation of international security through the web of alliances of the newly established United Nations. For all its inadequacies and failings, the Churchillian ideal of international coöperation had been upheld as the best way to safeguard America’s security and interests by every president until the Bush Administration kicked it over. This is the nut of Kerry’s argument on foreign relations—that Bush, despite his campaign slogan of “Steady leadership in times of change,” is a radical, whose “with us or against us” doctrine of preëmptive unilateralism amounts to a Texas-twanged cry of aux barricades! By contrast, the Senator from Massachusetts came across at Westminster as the conservative in the race.

But did this “plan” for multilateralism as an expression of naked self-interest amount to a countervailing Kerry doctrine? “I think it’s such a mistake to try to find one or two words, fancy slogans, to reduce a complicated process,” Kerry said to me, during a lengthy conversation in a muggy old athletes’ training room at Westminster, where he draped his elongated limbs over a too small chair. The notion of a Kerry doctrine seemed to take him by surprise, and not pleasantly. “You have to be careful of ideology clouding your decision-making process, which I think this Administration has been exceedingly guilty of,” he said, and added, “I don’t want to use the word ‘doctrine,’ but I do think it is time for a new—I said it today—a very new calculation of how we protect our interests and balance them in the world.” At the same time, he allowed, “There are times and places where you may lay down a law of behavior that amounts to a doctrine—you know, how you take a nation to war. Pretty firm in my belief system is the notion that, with the exception of an immediate emergency you have to respond to, it’s a last resort.” As a naval officer in Vietnam, Kerry had learned that he could kill when it came to that, and he told me, “I would never hesitate to use force to protect our country in any moment in time if I thought it was critical.” But he didn’t say how he might make that judgment.

Kerry has a habit of phoning around among a far-flung network of counsellors to gather conflicting opinions before reaching a decision. One result of this spongelike method is that it can be very hard for the person on the other end of a conversation with him to know just where he is heading as he circumnavigates an issue. It is not always obvious that Kerry knows, either, and his disinclination to codify his thinking on international relations, beyond a broad internationalist critique of the Bush doctrine, is generally seen as a political handicap.

“If you’re an extremist, everything’s clear,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, said to me. “You’re fighting terror, period, wherever it is—it’s evil. Or you love everybody and foreign policy consists of being sweet to others, period. Whereas if you’re in the middle you have to sort of say, Well, we have to use power, but we have to be sensitive to principle, and you have to sometimes deal with dictators, yet promote democracy, and sometimes you have to use force, but generally speaking you have to be careful not to be excessive. You know, that kind of stuff. And that’s always much more difficult to explain.”

Kerry, however, makes no apologies for viewing foreign policy as a balancing act. After all, our chief enemies abroad, whether they be jihadi terrorists or North Korean Communists, are radical fundamentalists for whom dogma is impervious to reality. “Steady leadership in times of change” is a slogan that could apply equally to Kim Jong Il and Osama bin Laden. But Kerry contends that the slogan does not properly describe George Bush, and his objection is as much to the word “steady” as it is to the claim of “leadership.” Throughout the Democratic primary race, Kerry assailed Bush as “the biggest say-one-thing, do-another” President he’d ever seen, a charge the Bush campaign simplified to “flip-flopper” and hurled back at him in a seventy-million-dollar advertising campaign attacking him as if he were the incumbent. The accusations sound the same—each man is calling the other a liar—but there is a sharp difference between Bush’s complaint that Kerry is confusing and his positions elastic, and Kerry’s argument that Bush sows confusion with words and deeds that are deviously at odds. In Kerry’s view, Bush may come on as an ideologue, but his actions, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, or in regard to homeland security, are invariably opportunistic, insufficient, and lacking the commitment that true conviction requires—in a word, cynical. In contrast to Bush’s dogmatic rigidity, Kerry’s flexibility—a difficult selling point for a candidate in any other context—can seem reassuring. His objection to ideology appears to be both visceral and intellectual, and in advocating what might be called a return from a faith-based foreign policy to a reality-based approach, his greatest challenge in running against Bush without an opposing doctrine is to make the case for being nonideological without seeming unprincipled.

“I have a thirty-five-year record of making it clear what my foreign policy is,” Kerry told me a few weeks ago in Washington. “I supported Bosnia. I supported Kosovo. I supported Haiti. I supported Panama. I support military action when I think it is appropriate. I supported deploying troops in the Western Pacific when we needed to stand up to the testing that the Chinese were doing with respect to Taiwan. I’m clear about my willingness to use force if necessary to protect our interests in the world and obviously to protect the security of our country.” At the same time, he said, “There are some clear routes by which you build alliances and make yourself stronger . . . build legitimacy for what you might have to do on your own otherwise.” After all, he said, “nineteenth-century and twentieth-century leaders didn’t have it all wrong as they understood the machinations of alliance politics and the need to negotiate your interest to the degree that you can until you’ve exhausted every possibility of doing so. You go backward to Disraeli and Metternich and forward to Henry Kissinger, in more recent times, and see how effectively we’ve moved on that stage. I don’t think this crowd has moved with great effect at all. I think they’ve been strangely and uniquely ideologically obsessed, Iraq-centric, to the exclusion of other critical priorities on the face of this planet and our security needs as a nation.”

In 1971, as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry was called to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he argued that it was not too late for America to reverse its course in Vietnam, so that “thirty years from now, when a man is walking down the street without an arm, or a face, or a leg, and a little boy asks him why, he will have to say ‘Vietnam’—and mean not a desert, not an obscene memory, but mean instead a place where America finally turned and soldiers like us helped in the turning.” President Nixon was rattled. A White House tape made the next day, and quoted by the historian Douglas Brinkley in his book “Tour of Duty,” recorded Nixon telling his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, that Kerry was a “real star,” and that, unlike the usual run of “bearded weirdos” protesting the war, “he was extremely effective.” (Within a week, Nixon’s counsel, Charles Colson, was looking for dirt on Kerry. “He is sort of a phony, isn’t he?” Nixon asked hopefully.)

Kerry believed that the American mission in Vietnam could not be saved, but he has opposed calls for a withdrawal from Iraq. At a campaign stop at City College, in Manhattan, in mid-April, when the Marines’ fierce, and ultimately failed, campaign to pacify the Iraqi insurgent capital of Falluja was at its deadliest, Kerry was harangued by another former Vietnam War protester, a retired math professor named Walter Daum. “What the United States is doing is bombing hospitals, bombing mosques, sniping at civilians, killing hundreds of civilians, wounding thousands of civilians. And you say, ‘Stay the course?’ ” Daum shouted. Kerry waded toward him through the audience. “This is an imperialist country that’s fighting an imperialist war,” Daum said. “People hate George Bush. By the end of your Presidency, people will hate you for the same thing.” Kerry had drawn to just beyond arm’s reach of Daum. “We are where we are, sir,” he said firmly. “And it would be unwise beyond belief for the United States of America to leave a failed Iraq in its wake.”

Being attacked as a hawk from the left while being dismissed as a dove from the right has helped Kerry to position himself as a centrist on both domestic and foreign policy. But questions about how and when he would use force abroad have vexed him throughout his Presidential bid, not least because he voted against the original Gulf War. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was an act of naked aggression, Kuwait was an ally, and vigorous American diplomacy had mustered a broad-based international coalition, including troops from five Arab nations, to join in the fighting under a U.N. mandate. During the early primaries, Howard Dean upheld the first Gulf War as being every bit as legitimate as the current one was unjustified, and he questioned Kerry’s judgment as a potential Commander-in-Chief.

Kerry defends his stand on both wars on the same ground: that the action was needlessly rushed, when a little bit more time could have been used to build a lot more support—in 1990 among an almost evenly divided American public, and last year among potential allies. In fact, in his Senate speech against the Gulf War resolution in 1991, Kerry repeatedly invoked the failures and agonies of Vietnam, arguing that the country was not ready to sacrifice another generation to the horrors of combat. He maintained that diplomacy could get Saddam out of Kuwait, and although he insisted that he was not a pacifist, he sure sounded like one when he read to his colleagues from the classic antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun.”

After Saddam’s surrender, in 1991, the first President Bush declared that America had been cured of its isolationist Vietnam syndrome, and, by all indications, Kerry was proof of that. In the subsequent decade, his willingness to approve force evolved, crisis by crisis, from a stated principle into a practice. A member of his Senate staff told me that, like everyone in Washington, he had agreed with the Clinton Administration’s refusal in 1994 to acknowledge the genocide in Rwanda, much less approve an international intervention there, even without American troops. “We learned a lesson: what happens if you don’t act to stop these kinds of crimes, and that we had to do it, that that was our responsibility,” the staffer said, and Kerry later supported American interventions in the Balkans. “Republicans hated—hated!—Clinton for going into Kosovo and Bosnia,” the staffer said. “And now they’re all gung ho.” Bush has lately claimed the Iraq war to be a Kosovo-like “humanitarian intervention,” but that notion has never had more than a minuscule following among Democrats; and although Dean’s candidacy imploded in Iowa, and voters united around Kerry as the best bet to beat Bush, a deep vein of disapproval for his Iraq votes still runs through the Democratic base.

That unease is compounded by the obvious political calculation of Kerry’s vote last fall to withhold eighty-seven billion dollars of auxiliary support for the military in Afghanistan and Iraq. As one of his advisers put it to me, “Off the record, he did it because of Howard Dean. On the record, he has an elaborate explanation.” Kerry originally supported an amendment sponsored by Senator Joseph Biden that would have funded the war by temporarily reducing Bush’s tax cuts to the wealthiest one per cent of Americans. But Biden’s bill had no chance of passing in a Republican-dominated Senate, and Kerry’s absurdly abbreviated account of the matter—“I did vote for the eighty-seven billion before I voted against it”—has left him open to relentless Republican ridicule. Biden himself ultimately voted for the money, and he confirmed that Kerry’s decision not to was “tactical,” an attempt “to prove to Dean’s guys I’m not a warmonger.”

Kerry prefers to describe his opposition as a protest vote, since he cast it knowing that the measure would pass, and he considers it a minor matter compared with the Bush Administration’s own inconsistencies about Iraq. “They have flip-flopped every step of the way in this thing,” he told me. “They flip-flopped on their rationale, they flip-flopped on what they said they’d do, they flip-flopped on each of the promises the President made about how he’d conduct it. They flip-flopped on when they would transfer authority. They flip-flopped on to whom. They flip-flopped on the U.N. They have flip-flopped on the intel, and they have obviously flip-flopped on the numbers of troops needed and how they would manage those troops, what the deployment times would be. I mean, this is an unbelievable series of flip-flops, with grave consequences.”

At campaign rallies, Kerry often says of Bush, “If you think I would have taken us to war the way he did, you shouldn’t vote for me.” This line is carefully formulated, he told me, “Because I might well have been in Iraq if Saddam had stiffed the U.N., continued to not allow inspections, hidden things. But I would have brought other countries to the point of impatience with him. Then they would have been there with us. And the President could have done that. I know it because I spent the time to go up and meet with Security Council representatives. I talked to them at great length prior to the vote.”

Kerry was the only senator to go to New York for such a meeting. “I came away convinced that they were serious, that the resolutions did mean something, that they saw it as a moment for the U.N. to stand up for itself,” he said. “But they had political issues in their own countries, their own populations weren’t ready, they needed to go through a certain walk up to it. That was legitimate, and the President never gave them a chance to do that—forced it down their throats, built up so fast—and they became aware that he just intended to go do this. He sent them a message of disrespect without the process. Then they got their backs up, and that led to a series of stubborn encounters that resulted in a failed foreign policy.”

Last month, when the Bush Administration secured a resolution from the Security Council lending a stamp of international legitimacy to the new Iraqi interim government, Kerry told me, “They’re moving in my direction. What they’re doing is what they’ve been advised to do from Day One, and stubbornly refused to do.” But he pointed out that immediately after the U.N. vote Bush hosted the heads of state of the G8 at Sea Island, Georgia, and they rebuffed his request for more substantial assistance. “No debt relief, no troops, no money,” Kerry said. “Finally, the Administration is begrudgingly trying to take some international steps, and it’s probably too little too late.” At nato meetings in late June, Bush was again denied any help on the ground in Iraq by our allies.

Kerry remains confident that if he were President he could succeed where Bush has failed. Indeed, he seems to attribute all that is strained in the transatlantic alliance to the Administration’s hubris and its diplomatic incompetence. “It will be easier for a Kerry Administration to call on our allies to fulfill their responsibilities,” James P. Rubin, one of Kerry’s senior foreign-policy advisers, said to me. “When a President can go to countries and say ‘I’m going to take steps that you’ve been calling for,’ he can also say, ‘Now take steps to do what we need.’ It won’t be easy, but at this point there’s a political cost for countries to coöperate with the U.S. With a Kerry Administration, that cost will change.” But European resistance to the Iraq mission was stubborn from the outset, and an influential European diplomat in Washington told me, “If what John Kerry says today is that he thinks that Europeans could drag that car out of the mud now, I believe this is not a realistic expectation.” European leaders would certainly welcome a change of American Presidents, but they have their own elections to think about, and it is not clear that they would make much of a sacrifice for the new man. “Because of how it’s been handled so far, Iraq is really not a good case to demonstrate the great advantages of transatlantic coöperation,” another diplomat said to me. “It is actually the worst possible case. Iraq is simply too much of a mess.”

Kerry rejects the notion that Iraq is a quagmire. Watching the ferocity and the futility of the siege of Falluja, he said, reminded him of “a Hamburger Hill kind of mentality.” But he does not agree with other leading Democrats, like his friend Edward Kennedy, that Bush has created a new Vietnam in the sands of Arabia. “It could become one,” Kerry said. “Is it yet? No, it is not, and it doesn’t have to be.” Indeed, the possibility horrifies him. One of his proudest achievements in the Senate was his work, in collaboration with his colleague and fellow-veteran John McCain, to establish the normalization of relations between Washington and Hanoi—an effort that required intense diplomacy not only with the Vietnamese but also, more painstakingly, at home, where persistent claims that Vietnam was still holding American prisoners of war, and withholding the remains of Americans listed as missing in action, had first to be laid to rest. Nevertheless, he said, “the lessons of the war I fought in are clear and strong and powerful, but they’re not the whole definition of my foreign policy by any stretch of the imagination.”

Kerry allowed that, for a young man at war, “seeing people killed and being asked to use guns against other human beings has an impact.” But he said, “The real impact is in what it taught me about setting mission goals; what it taught me about the promises you make to Americans; what it taught me about telling the truth about what you’re into and not lying to the American people about what you’re trying to accomplish or how; what it taught me about obligations to those who serve; what it taught me about feeling left alone by your own government and not having the support of the nation.” Kerry didn’t think George W. Bush had learned those lessons about war. “He saw it in a big sort of distant way,” Kerry said. “He didn’t even read his father’s book, the critical page—or, if he did, he ignored it.”

The book, “A World Transformed,” was written by the first President Bush and his national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and the page in question describes why Bush the father left Saddam Hussein in power at the end of the Gulf War. To eliminate him would have incurred “incalculable human and political costs,” they claimed. “We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. . . . Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different—and perhaps barren—outcome.”

At the time, Kerry was one of many critics of the first President Bush’s abandonment of the oppressed Iraqis. But, in criticizing the second President Bush’s failure to plan for a post-Saddam Iraq, he told me, “Everything you’re seeing today was laid out in his father’s book.” As it happens, a number of things we’re seeing today were also laid out in a book by Kerry’s father, Richard Kerry, who was a mid-level diplomat in the Foreign Service in Europe in the fifties and sixties, where many of his assignments involved American relations with nato. In 1990—twenty-eight years after his retirement, and ten years before his death—he published a short book called “The Star-Spangled Mirror: America’s Image of Itself and the World,” a critical analysis of American attitudes toward other countries, political systems, and cultures, and particularly toward our nato allies. “On occasion we seemed to be telling them that we understood their vital interests better than they did,” Richard Kerry wrote, adding, “On many occasions the need to consult them in advance before taking unilateral action was simply ignored, and we often showed visible impatience with consultation.” What troubled him was what he perceived as an “ethnocentric” strain in the spirit of American exceptionalism, an approach to the world based on a stubborn conviction that “everyone ought to be like us.” Although the book was published after the Berlin Wall was breached, it was obviously completed while the wall still stood, and at its core it is an argument for what is known as a “realist” foreign policy—driven by a strict sense of national interests, with respect for other sovereignties, however alien or unsavory their values may be.

Richard Kerry took an equally dim view of Reagan’s “fatal error of seeing U.S. security as dependent on illusions of propagating democracy,” and of Carter’s “practice of asserting a ‘linkage’ that injected human rights into strategic issues.” The elder Kerry was an anti-crusader, without quite being comfortable with the idea of America as beacon, either. “The struggle to put policy in touch with reality was difficult enough before the siren song of promoting human rights,” he wrote. There wasn’t a President in the last half century whom he didn’t find to be infected by the zeal to divide the world into us and them. He was vexed by “those characteristics of the American mind which appear unalterably set against any contradiction by reality.” As for America’s involvement in Cold War proxy wars in the Third World, he wrote, “it requires a measure of self-righteousness to see unilateral measures as an act of collective security.”

Richard Kerry was a first-generation American, born in Boston in 1915. His parents, Fritz Kohn and Ida Lowe, were born Jewish—his father in what is now the Czech Republic, his mother in Hungary—and when they married they changed their name to Kerry (taking the name from a map of Ireland, the story goes) and converted to Catholicism before emigrating to America, in 1905. Fritz had become Frederick, also known as Fred, a businessman, who made and lost several fortunes in the shoe trade and as a sort of management consultant who reorganized department stores. One day, when Richard Kerry was six, Fred Kerry went to the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and shot himself in the head with a handgun. His widow took their three children back to Europe, rearing them in France and Germany. Richard Kerry returned to America to attend Yale as an undergraduate, and law school at Harvard, after which he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He met his wife, Rosemary Forbes, in Brittany, where her family had a summer house. She was as pure an American aristocrat as they come, a descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, and of the Reverend John Forbes, who was posted to Florida in the service of the British Empire in 1763, only to side with the Crown during the American Revolution and return to England, leaving behind two sons, who grew wealthy in the China trade. During the Second World War, Richard Kerry tested planes for the Army, until he contracted tuberculosis, and he was in a military hospital in Denver when his first son, John Forbes Kerry, was born, sixty-one years ago this December.

So Richard Kerry was a man of many worlds and many perspectives. He served America, and found America strange—“virtually the only nation that defines itself by dedication to a value system.” Others were defined by blood and soil or by raw power, and that made sense to him, too: if they didn’t want to change us, why should we seek to change them? Richard Kerry left the diplomatic service a disappointed, perhaps even disillusioned man, according to those who knew him. He had wanted to be an ambassador. The passion of his later years was sailing. He taught John Kerry to fly, but he never told him of his own father’s Jewish birth or the details of his suicide; a Boston Globe reporter broke that news, just two years ago. John Kerry’s younger brother, Cameron Kerry, a Boston lawyer, describes the relationship between the father and his eldest son as close and “sometimes contentious,” with “competitiveness from both sides” and “arguing about politics, adolescent kinds of battles.” Cameron Kerry, who is one of his brother’s closest advisers, told me that his father bombarded the Senator with faxes, telling him what to do on political issues—and “if he really meant it” every word was in capital letters. It was “his way of asserting himself, and taking, I think, great vicarious pleasure in John’s achievements and position,” Cameron Kerry said.

The example of the two Presidents Bush stands as a strong caution against ascribing to a son the politics of his father, but it is impossible to read the sub-headings of Richard Kerry’s chapter on the Vietnam War without hearing an echo in John Kerry’s view of Iraq: “The Course of Escalation,” “The Inability to Come to Grips with Reality,” “The Inability to Admit a Mistake,” “The Inability to Remain in the Context of Limited War” (i.e., Al Qaeda, not Saddam), “The Inability to Do Without Absolutes.” Like his father, John Kerry is often described as a foreign-policy “realist.” He recently told the Washington Post that he did not think human rights should be the defining issue in international relations, and he also shares his father’s aversion to grandiose expressions of American exceptionalism. He came of age believing that a misguided foreign policy is one of the greatest threats to America’s well-being. One of his Senate aides told me that he recoiled in dismay when Madeleine Albright, speaking about Iraq as Clinton’s Secretary of State, declared, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.” Of course, the aide said, “it is true that we are the biggest guy on the block. But I think in John Kerry’s mind that phrase, in the ears of others, rang very poorly.” Kerry did not dispute Albright’s contention, but he expressed the sentiment differently. “It has fallen to us to be that country,” he told me. “It’s not romantic, it’s not arrogant, it’s just a reality, that we’ve been needed to lead in so many situations to make something happen.”

Kerry acknowledges his father’s influence “as a sort of thoughtfulness about listening and about culture and history, aspirations of other countries, and trying to see them through their perspective, not just your own, because you’ll understand better how to get from here to there if you do that.” But, even as Kerry expressed filial gratitude and respect, he stressed that he’d also disagreed with his father on many issues. “He could sometimes come to an outcome that was less ready to use force than I might have been,” Kerry told me. “He was not thrilled with Kosovo or Bosnia, and I felt it was critical.”

For all his caution about gunboat diplomacy, and his qualified view of the value of human-rights-driven foreign policy, in the past year Kerry has criticized the Bush Administration for refusing to send marines into Liberia, when both sides in that country’s devastating civil war pleaded for an American intervention, and for failing to intervene more swiftly during political turmoil in Haiti. He has also called for urgent American involvement to stop the genocidal campaign against the people of Darfur, in Sudan, where the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development recently warned, “If nothing changes, we will have a million casualties. If things improve, we can get it down to about three hundred thousand deaths.”

There is no guessing what Kerry would do about Liberia, Haiti, or Darfur if he sat in the White House, but he says that the Iraq war needn’t drive America back into the isolationist attitudes of the Vietnam syndrome. He insists that Iraq be seen as the Bush Administration’s mistake, not America’s, and that in the future, when there is a legitimate rationale to act in America’s interest “with respect for the American people, with an openness, with truth, with legitimate cause and intelligence,” then “Americans will follow the truth and respond to the real needs of our country.”

No other Vietnam War hero has ever been nominated for President, nor has any other former antiwar leader, and, while Kerry presents himself as a unifying figure, he embodies a conflict that is still surprisingly raw. “He’ll often thrash around in the night,” the filmmaker George Butler, who is one of Kerry’s oldest friends, told me. “He smashed up a lamp in my house in New Hampshire, in the bedroom where he was staying. Most Vietnam veterans go through this.” Butler, who made Arnold Schwarznegger famous outside the weight-lifting community with the documentary “Pumping Iron,” is now making a film about Kerry, based loosely on Douglas Brinkley’s book, which tells the story of Kerry’s service as a naval officer in command of Swift boats in 1968 and 1969. Kerry was in combat in Vietnam for four months, and he came home with three Purple Hearts for relatively minor wounds, a Bronze Star “for heroic achievement,” a Silver Star “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action,” and with what he called his “war notes,” hundreds of handwritten pages of journals and impressions. Excerpts from these writings form the best part of Brinkley’s book. There is no more intimate glimpse into Kerry’s inner reaches available, and what comes across, even when he is surrounded by the absurdity and waste of war, is the sense of a young man keenly alive to the world around him and to the strength of his own voice.

After a ferocious firefight, during which the corpse of a Vietnamese fighter he had known lay at his feet—“the alive shooting over the dead to remain alive”—Kerry wrote:

I was amazed at how detached I was from the whole scene. I just lay in the ditch, not firing because I wanted to save ammo and because I couldn’t see what I was firing at and I thought about what was happening in New York at that very moment and if people really felt that I was doing something worthwhile, while they went down to Schrafft’s and had another ice cream sundae or while some fat little old man who made another million in the past months off defense contracts was charging another $100 call girl to his expense account. And then, when the shooting stopped, I came back to where I was.

On another occasion, he wrote several pages about a mission to drop off Navy seal commandos close to the Cambodian border:

Running the rivers at night was something like flying a plane on instruments. The only difference was that we didn’t have any instruments. When it was pitch-black and there was no moon, the banks would blend in with the water and looking through the glass windows in the pilothouse, it was exceedingly difficult to find a horizon and tell where one was in the river. One could feel a graceful motion from the calm cut of the boat through the water, and this only lent further to the feeling of vertigo that sometimes caught the drivers. . . .

A group of the Vietnamese junks pulled in alongside us and we sat there listening to their small engines burp into the quiet of the night. Across the river, perhaps fifty yards away, we could see the villagers moving around in their huts, silhouetted by the fires that burned throughout the small town. The peculiar smell of their wood burning blew across us in wisps. All over Vietnam this smell had been the same. It was a smell that brought to mind poverty and dirty food and the ground to sleep on at night and it made me feel very clean and out of place.

Beyond the physical sensitivity of Kerry’s fine-tuned prose—his acute alertness to the shifting elements of sight, sound, smell, and movement that compose his narrow riverine universe in the jungle—what is most striking about this passage is that so little of it is about him. Only at the end, as if in afterthought, does he step back from his immersion in the Vietnamese night to register his awareness of himself as an alien intruder. Even when he tells of dissociating himself from battle by shutting his mind’s eye and thinking of Schrafft’s the focus is on all that lies outside him.

This quality of apartness—some call it aloofness; some call it shyness—remains one of Kerry’s most striking characteristics. In his boyhood, the Kerry family had no fixed address: they lived for a while on a farm outside Boston and for a time in Washington, then hopscotched around Europe on diplomatic postings of a few years each. When he was eleven, John Kerry was sent to boarding school in Switzerland for two years. Loneliness may be something one is born to—no formula can precisely correlate such inner states to external context—but Kerry’s boyhood required him to fend for himself emotionally at an early age. His bloodlines carried a sense of privilege and noblesse oblige, but his parents’ means were limited, and he could not take his position for granted. “We’re not the Forbes fortune, unfortunately—not in the direct line,” Cameron Kerry told me. “We were often exposed to it, around it, but not of it.” When John Kerry was sent to prep school at St. Paul’s, a great-aunt paid his tuition. In that bastion of sniffy Wasp insularity, Kerry stood out as a Catholic and as an unabashedly ambitious and serious kid. To boys with less, he might appear effete, but to those in his milieu who came from money and power sufficient not to question their entitlement he was often seen to be trying too hard.

“That irony is there,” Cam Kerry, who eventually went to St. Paul’s, too, said. He called the school “a very narrow place,” and acknowledged that his brother had not always known how to connect. “When you’re moving so fast, you don’t get a chance to see the things around you, and John’s always moving at a frenetic pace. Sometimes if you’re going eighty-five miles an hour in a car, you don’t see the things at the side of the road. If you’re going slower, you have more time to do that.” Cam Kerry explained his brother’s hurtling momentum as “metabolic”—“I mean he just has extraordinary energy and drive.” And John Kerry told me, “Listen, I can veg out on a beach like everybody else and be very happy. But I am a person who likes to get things done.”

Kerry’s earnest intensity was better suited to Yale, where he forged passionate and enduring friendships. As a champion debater, the head of the Yale Political Union, a member of Skull and Bones, and, ultimately, class orator, he was already understood to have an eye on the White House. He claims that his great love in those years was aviation, and jokes that he “majored in flying” during his senior year, spending a lot of time in the air with his fellow-Bonesman Frederick Smith, who later founded FedEx. Kerry has attributed his decision to enlist in the Navy rather than the Air Force to his father’s warning that the strain of serving as a pilot in wartime can dim the pure joy of flying for its own sake. Having volunteered for service, Kerry volunteered again for combat, although when he asked to be assigned to the Swift boats he thought they would be patrolling the South China Sea. “I didn’t really want to get involved in the war,” Kerry wrote later, and, he explained, “when I signed up for the Swift boats they had very little to do with the war.” By the time he got his first boat, however, the Swift fleet was reassigned to the Mekong Delta, which was then one of the nastiest and deadliest arenas in Vietnam. Kerry’s death-haunted journals are filled with fantasies of escape—to be a little boy again playing in the attic, to be like a toy bird, free “to hop on a breeze and be blown restlessly to some new horizon with new hope and strength.”

These days, Kerry surrounds himself on the campaign with fellow-veterans, and he features his naval career heavily in campaign ads, but he prefers not to speak in any detail about what he went through in Vietnam. Few voters knew the story of how he won his Bronze Star for saving a man’s life until that man, a lifelong Republican named Jim Rassmann, showed up in Des Moines during the last days of the Iowa primary race and returned the favor, helping to save Kerry’s political life by describing how Kerry, wounded and under fire, pulled him, hand over hand, from the water after he was blown off another American boat. Even then, Kerry said almost nothing about the incident, leaving the talking to Rassmann, with whom he’d had no contact in the intervening thirty-five years. He also resists speaking publicly about the incident that won him the Silver Star, but his surviving crewmates have told how, when they were ambushed by a Vietcong guerrilla firing rockets from the riverbank, Kerry made an instantaneous decision that evasive action was impossible, turned his boat directly into the fire, beached it, and leaped ashore, to the astonishment of the man with the rocket launcher, who popped up from his spider hole and fled. Kerry chased him and killed him. Navy men were not supposed to leave their ships during combat, and before recommending Kerry for the medal his commanding officer quipped that he wasn’t sure whether he shouldn’t court-martial him instead.

Reading Brinkley’s book, one wonders why Kerry’s campaign does not make more of another occasion when Kerry was sharply reprimanded for having stepped ashore. On a narrow tributary of the Duong Keo River, he and his crew came upon what looked like a deserted village. Then someone thought he saw a man running away. There was no response to a call for surrender, and Kerry took his gun and went to have a look. As he approached, forty-two Vietnamese—women, children, and old men—appeared with empty hands raised. They were in desperate shape, hungry and sick, and although Kerry received radio instructions to leave them and get on with the business of killing enemy combatants, he herded the villagers onto boats and took them to the nearest American base to receive food and medical care. “For an afternoon,” he told Brinkley, “it felt good to really be helping the Vietnamese instead of destroying their villages.”

Even before he volunteered for Vietnam, Kerry had begun to question the wisdom of the war, and, in a photograph of the pinning ceremony when he received the Bronze Star, he appears in his stiff dress whites and peaked cap, with his chin held high, his mouth turned downward in a grimace, and his eyes fixed far away, as if he were bracing himself for the stab of an inoculation. Two years later, Kerry began his antiwar testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by recounting hearings that the Vietnam Veterans Against the War had recently held in Detroit, where “many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia.” These crimes, Kerry said, were committed “on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” To hear these veterans’ stories, he said, was to understand “the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do”:

At times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

That same week, on “Meet the Press,” Kerry said:

I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used .50-calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law, the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.

A few months ago, Kerry again appeared on “Meet the Press,” where Tim Russert replayed that thirty-three-year-old clip and asked, “You committed atrocities?” Kerry said he regretted the word: “a bad word,” he called it, “an inappropriate word.” Such language reflected the anger of the time, he explained, “and I don’t like it when I hear it today.” But he did not disavow the underlying judgment. “It was honest,” he said. He knew that his critics took his remarks as a blanket condemnation of anyone who had served in Vietnam, and of America itself, and he told Russert, “I want you to notice that, at the end, I wasn’t talking about the soldiers and the soldiers’ blame, and my great regret is, I hope no soldier—I mean, I think some soldiers were angry at me for that, and I understand that and I regret that, because I love them.” When Russert declared that a lot of the stories of hideous criminality that Kerry recounted in his Senate testimony “had been discredited,” Kerry cut him off: “Actually, a lot of them have been documented.” After a moment, he said, “Have some been discredited? Sure, they have.” But Kerry remained proud of having taken a stand and of the stand he took. “I think we saved lives,” he said.

The length of Kerry’s answer, with its convolutions, qualifications, and repetitions, obscured the logic of his argument. This has been a persistent problem for him. While his habit of hedging may reflect an agile mind eager to preëmpt any possible misunderstandings, even those close to him complain that it can make his most consistent statements sound inconsistent. “John is substantively more sure-footed than he is politically adept,” Joseph Biden, a longtime friend and colleague of Kerry’s on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me. Another Kerry adviser said, “He talks Senate-speak, which is confusing.” Biden, who prefers to think that being a senator and being clear are not mutually contradictory propositions, said, “My plea to John is: ‘John, I don’t want to hear you explain another fucking thing. Be declarative.’ And he’ll say to me, ‘Well, I’ll say it and explain it.’ I say, ‘Don’t explain it! Say it! Question and answer, period.’ ” Kerry’s ability to deliver swift, unambiguous statements has improved in the course of the campaign, and for now the controversy of his antiwar speeches has died down. In fact, the issue vanished abruptly from the news as soon as the story of torture at Abu Ghraib prison broke.

Bob Kerrey, the former senator, who lost a leg in Vietnam and won a medal of honor, and has since acknowledged being involved in atrocities while on a mission there, admires John Kerry’s advocacy against the war. “It was an act of courage,” he told me. Given the passions of the time, he said, “I thank God the microphone wasn’t on and recording everything I said when I was twenty-five years of age.”

Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, remembers the effect of John Kerry’s testimony in the Senate in 1971, as “second only to Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ ” speech. Popkin had avoided the draft in an unusual manner, by going to Vietnam, in 1966, on a government-funded research grant to study village life during the war, and he had concluded, “The Communists are bad people, and it’s better for Vietnam if we win than if we lose. But we’re gonna lose, and it’s not worth it for America.” Still, he couldn’t relate to the draft dodgers back home. When he heard Kerry’s impassioned critique of the war, he said, “I was truly moved by being able to be antiwar without being anti-American. And I’m not very moved by most antiwar people, because they—not everybody, but many—were trying to make a moral principle out of cowardice. When somebody came and said, ‘I’ve been hit three times and let’s get out’—it’s just different at that point. I’d never heard of Kerry before that. And it was extraordinary. It reminded me of those medieval agrarian revolts where they’d go to a nobleman and say ‘Speak for us.’ ”

Later, when Popkin was living in Boston and studying American political campaigns—work that led to his classic book “The Reasoning Voter”—he met Kerry at several dinners, and his reaction was “Where’s the fire?” He found Kerry to be “powerful, thoughtful, but not crisp, and lacking in relaxed warmth.” On reflection, this made sense to Popkin. “That’s a thing about real warriors and great generals who are definitely very cool under fire,” he said. “True heroes aren’t flamboyant hyperbolists like the Ollie North types who look like they’re ready to fly off. Real warriors are often more like chess players than like steroid-crazy defensive linemen. They’re cold, quiet types, who only wake up when they have to act.”

Popkin argues that Kerry’s heroism in Vietnam, and the courage of his conviction in his Senate testimony—particularly when compared with Bush’s avoidance of the war, and his absenteeism from the Texas Air National Guard—is more important to the campaign than the particulars of his position on Iraq, because voters know what they think about Vietnam and remain confused by Iraq. “I want to know that, if push comes to shove, this guy’s going to do the right thing,” Popkin said. In his view, Vietnam is “a character magnifier,” and, just as Kerry’s war record can only help him, Bush’s can only hurt. “He’s been President for four years, so why does something he said about the National Guard matter? Here’s the answer: if you have doubts about now, that magnifies the doubts. It’s really easier to divorce him if you find out that he wasn’t honest in the first place—or if he’s having trouble paying you back and you find out he was bankrupt once.”

Rand Beers served with the Marines in Vietnam, and he has served as a foreign-policy or national-security officer under every President since Richard Nixon. In August of 2002, the Bush Administration named Beers Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism on the National Security Council, a post he’d held under Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush. This was a version of the job that had previously been held by Beers’s good friend Richard Clarke, who is now famous as the author of “Against All Enemies,” the best-selling exposé of Bush’s Iraq and terrorism policies. Within a few months of his assignment, Beers concluded, as Clarke did also, that the Administration’s focus on Iraq was sapping its attention to the war on terrorism and the demands of homeland security. But his alarm at the resurgence of warlordism in the former Al Qaeda strongholds of Afghanistan was ignored, and on the eve of the invasion of Iraq he resigned from the White House “in opposition to the war” and, he told me, “because I wanted to be part of changing the regime” in Washington. “We were supposed to be facing the most important enemy that we had, Al Qaeda, and we were moving off of that.” Beers soon had a new job, as the top foreign-policy and national-security man on the Kerry campaign.

Beers had admired Kerry’s work in the Senate on the Iran-Contra investigation, on narco-terrorism, and on the restoration of relations with Vietnam. But he was especially encouraged by the speed with which Kerry began to question the Bush Administration’s dedication to fighting Al Qaeda after September 11th. Kerry was among the first public figures, in 2002, to charge that Bush had not matched his action to his rhetoric in pursuing Osama bin Laden but had in fact let him slip away in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, where American commanders hired tribal fighters of dubious allegiance to pursue him instead of sending in our Special Forces. (“After all the chest-thumping, and commitment of America to avenge what happened and to capture Osama bin Laden, we were timid—to say the least—at Tora Bora, and in our response,” Kerry told me.) “We didn’t know then what we know now” about Bush’s eagerness to shift the theatre of war to Iraq, Beers said, but Kerry’s “prescient” recognition that the fight against Al Qaeda was being neglected convinced him that Kerry was the man to back against Bush. As it turned out, Beers said, “Iraq, for better or worse, has become part of the war on terrorism if only because it is an inspiration to Al Qaeda in its recruitment efforts.” But he told me, “At the same time, we’re going to have to figure out how to strengthen the war on terrorism more broadly, which is why we come back to that central point, which is, we have to find a way to bring more of the world into this part of the struggle.”

Beers’s prominent position in the campaign reflects Kerry’s desire not to allow Iraq to define the limits of the foreign-policy debate. In late May and early June, Kerry gave a series of speeches about national security, in which his focus was pointedly on areas that have been eclipsed by Iraq: nuclear proliferation, homeland security, and the expansion and transformation of the military. In these speeches and on the stump, Kerry rarely speaks directly of the September 11th attacks, cutting a strong contrast to Bush, for whom that was the date when “everything changed,” an all-defining political conversion experience that serves as the equivalent of his renunciation of alcohol in favor of Christianity. What was destroyed for Bush on that day was all that came before, and he seemed to welcome the destruction as if it filled a great void. Afterward, he joked that he could now increase the national deficit. War, recession, national emergency, he said: “Lucky me, I hit the trifecta.”

Bush’s three-horse apocalypse set him free; as a “war President” he has felt justified in doing whatever he likes and nothing he doesn’t care to. But the immediate popular heroes of September 11th were the firemen and emergency medical technicians, whose national unions have both endorsed Kerry. That day was truly “a central moment,” Kerry said to me, but he added, “There are certain rules of behavior and standards of relationships that have served us for centuries, which didn’t change. The need to be strong through alliances didn’t change. The need to be strong through a military that is well equipped and second to nobody in the world in its execution and capacity to meet the challenge of the moment didn’t change.”

Kerry went on, “I think this Administration has made America less safe in the world generally. . . . They haven’t transformed the military the way they should’ve. Our troops are overextended.” The Pentagon’s policy of forcing National Guard and reserve troops to remain on active duty after completing their tours amounts to “a back-door draft,” he said. In the meantime, “we haven’t contained the loose nuclear materials we should’ve in Russia. How are we safer with so much nuclear material available to terrorists? I think if you just measure these threats—go around the nation, ask hospitals if they’re prepared for an emergency bio-terror attack—there are inexcusable, glaring deficiencies.” There was no reason for America to be so weak, and it was not just a question of military defense. The country needed to “unleash the full panoply of weapons in our arsenal, which includes our economic assistance—economic clout—our aid programs, our Peace Corps, our ideas, our values, our health care, our technology.” Winning the war of ideas is a challenge, Kerry said, “but it’s not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash of civilization vs. uncivilization.”

Kerry’s litany of all that the Bush Administration has ignored is very nearly as big as the world: China’s rise as a huge power, Russia’s uncertain transition, Iran’s nuclear program, and North Korea’s unchecked accumulation of atomic bombs. Ronald Reagan was willing to sit down with Gorbachev and work for disarmament. “Did the Russians cheat?” Kerry said. “You’re damn right they did. Did we continue to talk to them? You’re damn right we did. Did we eventually get to a more intrusive verification? You bet we did. And ultimately that’s how you go down the road.” But Bush abandoned comparable efforts with North Korea because, he claimed, he didn’t want to reward bad behavior. Now Pyongyang was “moving in the other direction, building a new round of nuclear weapons, scrapping treaties, and literally sending messages that they’ll do whatever they want,” Kerry said. “That is not a way to create a safer world.”

Where was America? Kerry kept asking. Why doesn’t the Secretary of State spend more time on airplanes? “Get out front,” he said. The Israelis and the Palestinians need help: “This Administration disengaged for fourteen straight months in an unprecedented fashion, allowing the Middle East to sort of spiral down.” Kerry acknowledged that America has “a special relationship with Israel,” and that “the fact is Israel has no negotiating party today” on the Palestinian side. But he said, “I believe we should have been consistently engaged. I think we should be engaged in economic transformation. We should be engaged in more direct efforts with the Saudi Arabians, the Egyptians, and the other countries to develop that entity that Israel can deal with, to stop the support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Al Aqsa Brigade, and to be legitimate. And to do that you’ve got to be viewed as willing to be an honest broker.”

After thirty-five years in public life, Kerry is still very much a work in progress, as anyone who dares to be President must be, until he is defeated or retires. He is also uneven, alternating between intensely focussed discipline and lucidity and phases of vagueness, when he goes into a sort of battery-saver mode. “John always hits the long ball when he’s ready to call it, and he’s always capable of rising to the occasion,” his friend George Butler told me. “But in a curious kind of way he does play possum in the unimportant moments, almost as a way to divert people’s attention from his ultimate goal.” Every politician claims to prefer it when the punditry “misunderestimates” him, as President Bush put it, but John Kerry didn’t appear to be enjoying it a bit in December, when he was getting slaughtered in the polls, and even members of his staff shook their heads when he pronounced himself “a good closer.” Anthony Trollope, writing about love and politics, observed, “Men are never gentle in their triumph.” But there was no mistaking the sweetness Kerry was savoring on primary night after primary night this year as he embraced his wife, Teresa, at his victory parties.

Shortly after his Senate testimony on Vietnam, in 1971, Kerry was featured in a segment of “60 Minutes,” titled “First Hurrah,” during which he was asked if he wanted to be President. “Of the United States?” Kerry said. “No. That’s such a crazy question.” But he has wanted to be where he is, running for President in an epochal election, for a very long time, and the ferocious contest he finds himself in is well suited to him, not because he likes combat, exactly, but because in combat he tends to handle himself well. Of course, as he knows, many good soldiers have fallen in battle.

“It seems to me that John Kerry is as perfect an embodiment of our national passage since 1965 as John F. Kennedy was for an earlier generation,” Richard Holbrooke told me. “John F. Kennedy and George Bush senior were good heroes in a good war. Kerry was a good hero in a bad war, and then turned against the war. Ever since then, he has stood for a committed internationalist foreign policy. He believes in American values passionately, and he also believes in the limits of military power, and in its application when necessary. John Kerry is normally a cautious person, except that every once in a while he does these amazing things, like turning his Swift boat right at his Vietcong attackers. He is both careful and fearless, cautious when he approaches an issue, and then very decisive. He’s not scared of head-on confrontation.” But Holbrooke said, “This is a referendum on Bush and Iraq. We’ve got a long way to go to the election, and three undetermined events are key here—what happens in Iraq, whether we kill or capture bin Laden, and whether or not there is a terrorist attack in the United States.”

Kerry doesn’t disagree, although he told me, “No matter what happens, the economy is going to be important. But I think these guys—what they’re trying to do to me reflects their bankruptcy of ideas. They don’t have a real economic plan, except for the tax cut. They don’t have a real health-care plan. They don’t have a plan for education, except the broken promise of ‘No Child Left Behind.’ So, therefore, what do they do? They attack, they attack, they attack, they attack. And I will continue to talk throughout this campaign about foreign policy and the war on terror and how to make America more secure.” That was the bottom line, he said: “I think we can do better. I know we can do better. I absolutely know we can do better.” By John Kerry’s own assessment, doing better is a woefully low standard—and that, he told me, was precisely what made him run for President. “I just said, ‘This has gotta stop.’ ” ♦

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